Mindshift is designed to help boost your career and life in today’s fast-paced learning environment. Whatever your age or stage, Mindshift teaches you essentials such as how to get the most out of online learning and MOOCs, how to seek out and work with mentors, the secrets to avoiding career ruts (and catastrophes) and general ruts in life, and insights such as the value of selective ignorance over general competence. We’ll provide practical insights from science about how to learn and change effectively even in maturity, and we’ll build on what you already know to take your life’s learning in fantastic new directions. This course is designed to show you how to look at what you’re learning, and your place in what’s unfolding in the society around you, so you can be what you want to be, given the real world constraints that life puts on us all. You’ll see that by using certain mental tools and insights, you can learn and do more—far more—than you might have ever dreamed!
This course can be taken independent of, concurrent with, or subsequent to, its companion course, Learning How to Learn. (Mindshift is more career focused, and Learning How to Learn is more learning focused.)

审阅

SN

Thank you Barbara. It was really enjoyable trip with you in this course. I have found many new learning techniques. Your positive behavior was very encouraging for me to begin a new list of my life!

MB

May 26, 2017

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I really like this teaching duo. I want to take more classes from them and continue learning how to learn. Simple concepts combined with scientific explanations made this a very fun class to learn.

从本节课中

Change IS possible

In today's world, change is the only constant. This means that whatever stage you are in life, you need to keep yourself open and able to change. How can you do this? In three ways: Learn more about your hidden capabilities and assets. Learn more about learning effectively. Learn about matching your assets with the opportunities that face you. In this week, we'll dive into these three important areas!

Dr. Barbara Oakley

Dr. Terrence Sejnowski

Scott Mathews

脚本

[MUSIC] We should take a few minutes here to touch on the differences between men and women when it comes to natural passions. A biggie here is the hormone testosterone. Testosterone has lots of effects, especially on guys, because guys have lots more of it. Testosterone makes for mustaches, and maybe a bit more cocky behavior, and all sorts of guy things that I tend to kind of like. Even in the womb, guys generally have lots more testosterone than gals. Okay, here I want to show a chart that reveals how testosterone makes a difference in the development of boys and girls math abilities. Well, [LAUGH] obviously, there isn't really an effect. Where testosterone does have an effect, at least early on, is in verbal abilities. As infants and children develop, it turns out that testosterone can serve as a sort of developmental drag on verbal abilities. So little boys, who have more testosterone, tend on average to get a bit delayed behind girls in their verbal development. This is part of why girls, on average, are more verbally advanced than boys. Remember, boys and girls are roughly equivalent on average in their math and science skills. But when you start to put things together, on average, a girl can look within herself and her own abilities and say, hey, you know what, I'm kind of better at verbal sorts of things. And it's true. A boy, on the other hand, can look within himself, and say, hey, I'm a little better at math kind of things and that's true too. And all of these happen even though girls and boys have roughly the same basic ability to do math. Keep in mind that this is just an average. Individuals can vary quite a bit. And while boys can catch up later in their verbal development, by then, their self image has already begun to solidify. We often develop passions about what we're really good at. As it turns out, it seems easier for girls to get good at subjects requiring strong verbal skills. For boys, quantitative subjects can seem easier than those involving verbal skills. Remember, again this is even though boys and girls have roughly the same basic abilities to do math and science. Unfortunately, what all this does mean is that girls frequent big advantage. Their more advanced verbal skills can inadvertently also serve as a disadvantage. Because of their early verbal advantage, women can sometimes come to believe that their passions lie in language-oriented areas which accounts for part of the reason that there are a fewer women in the technical and scientific fields. Despite the fact that women, as well as men, are strongly needed in those fields. Passions develop about what we're good at but some things take longer for us to get good at. In fact, research has shown that if something seems hard for us, we can actually learn it better than if it was straightforward and easy. All of this can have a bearing on what career paths we tend to choose, especially when we hear advice like, follow your passion which is often taken to mean, do what comes easiest for you. In the discussion forum, describe what you've done or plan to do to broaden your passions in learning, going beyond what you feel you're naturally good at. You can help inspire us all. I'm Barbara Oakley, happy Mindshift. [MUSIC]